Though renamed USX Corporation in 1986, the company returned to its present name in 2001 after spinning off its energy business, including Marathon Oil, and other assets from its core steel concern. The company experienced significant downsizing during the 1980s; a decline in market capitalization resulted in its removal from the S&P 500 Index in 2014.[3][4]

According to author Douglas Blackmon in Slavery by Another Name,[10] the growth of U.S. Steel and its subsidiaries in the South was partly dependent on the labor of cheaply paid black workers and exploited convicts. The company could obtain black labor at a fraction of the cost of white labor by taking advantage of the Black Codes and discriminatory laws passed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries by Southern states after the Reconstruction era. In addition, U.S. Steel had agreements with more than twenty counties in Alabama to obtain the labor of its prisoners, often paying locales nine dollars a month for workers who would be forced into their mines through a system of convict leasing. This practice continued until at least the late 1920s. While some individuals were guilty of a crime they did not receive payment or recognition for their work; and many died from abuse, malnutrition, and dire working and living conditions. This practice was not, however, unique to U.S. Steel as eight Southern states in total had similar practices and many companies, as well as farmers, took advantage of this. [11][10]

The Corporation, as it was known on Wall Street,[3] was distinguished by its size, rather than for its efficiency or creativeness during its heyday. In 1901, it controlled two-thirds of steel production[3] and, through its Pittsburgh Steamship Company, developed the largest commercial fleet on the Great Lakes.[12] Because of heavy debts taken on at the company's formation—Carnegie insisted on being paid in gold bonds for his stake—and fears of antitrust litigation, U.S. Steel moved cautiously. Competitors often innovated faster, especially Bethlehem Steel, run by U.S. Steel's former first president, Charles M. Schwab. U.S. Steel's share of the expanding market slipped to 50 percent by 1911.[3]James A. Farrell was named president in 1911 and served until 1932.

U.S. Steel ranked 16th among United States corporations in the value of World War II production contracts.[13] Production peaked at more than 35 million tons in 1953. Its employment was greatest in 1943 when it had more than 340,000 employees.[3]

The federal government intervened to try to control U.S. Steel. President Harry S. Truman attempted to take over its steel mills in 1952 to resolve a crisis with its union, the United Steelworkers of America. The Supreme Court blocked the takeover by ruling that the president did not have the constitutional authority to seize the mills (see Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. v. Sawyer.[14]) President John F. Kennedy was more successful in 1962 when he pressured the steel industry into reversing price increases that Kennedy considered dangerously inflationary.[15] In the postwar years, the steel industry and heavy manufacturing went through restructuring that caused a decline in US Steel's need for labor, production, and portfolio. Many jobs moved offshore. By 2000, the company employed 52,500 people.[3]

In the early days of the Reagan Administration, steel firms won substantial tax breaks in order to compete with imported goods. But instead of modernizing their mills, steel companies shifted capital out of steel and into more profitable areas. In March 1982, U.S. Steel took its concessions and paid $1.4 billion in cash and $4.7 billion in loans for Marathon Oil, saving approximately $500 million in taxes through the merger. The architect of tax concessions to steel firms, Senator Arlen Specter (R-PA), complained that "we go out on a limb in Congress and we feel they should be putting it in steel."[16] The events are the subject of a song by folk singer Anne Feeney.

In 1984 the federal government prevented U.S. Steel from acquiring National Steel, and political pressure from the United States Congress, as well as the United Steelworkers (USW), forced the company to abandon plans to import British Steel Corporation slabs.[3] U.S. Steel finally acquired National Steel's assets in 2003 after National Steel went bankrupt. As part of its diversification plan, U.S. Steel had acquired Marathon Oil on January 7, 1982, as well as Texas Oil and Gas several years later. Recognizing its new scope, it reorganized its holdings as USX Corporation in 1986, with U.S. Steel (renamed USS, Inc.) as a major subsidiary.[17]

About 22,000 USX employees stopped work on August 1, 1986, after the United Steelworkers of America and the company could not agree on new employee contract terms. This was characterized by the company as a strike and by the union as a lockout. This resulted in most USX facilities becoming idle until February 1, 1987, seriously degrading the steel division's market share. A compromise was brokered and accepted by the union membership on January 31, 1987.[18] On February 4, 1987, three days after the agreement had been reached to end the work stoppage, USX announced that four USX plants would remain closed permanently, eliminating about 3,500 union jobs.[18] The closure of many plants created the term "rust belt" for a region of idle and derelict factories.

Corporate raiderCarl Icahn launched a hostile takeover of the steel giant in late 1986 in the midst of the work stoppage. He conducted separate negotiations with the union and with management and proceeded to have proxy battles with shareholders and management. But he abandoned all efforts to buy out the company on January 8, 1987, a few weeks before union employees returned to work.[18]

At the end of the twentieth century, the corporation was deriving much of its revenue and net income from its energy operations. Led by CEO Thomas Usher, U.S. Steel spun off Marathon and other non-steel assets (except railroad company Transtar) in October 2001. It expanded internationally for the first time by purchasing operations in Slovakia and Serbia.[19]

In the early 2010s, U.S. Steel began investing to upgrade software programs throughout their manufacturing facilities.[20]

In January 2012, U.S. Steel sold its Serbian mills outside Belgrade to the Serbian government, as their operations had been running at an economic loss.[21]

On May 2, 2014, U.S. Steel announced an undisclosed number of layoffs affecting employees worldwide.[22] On July 2, 2014, U.S. Steel was removed from S&P 500 index and placed in the S&P MidCap 400 Index, in light of its declining market capitalization.[4]

U.S. Steel once owned the Northampton & Bath Railroad.[23] The N&B was an 11-kilometer (6.8 mi) short-line railroad built in 1904 that served Atlas Cement in Northampton, Pennsylvania, and Keystone Cement in Bath, Pennsylvania.[24] By 1979 cement shipments had dropped off such that the railroad was no longer economically viable, and US Steel abandoned the line. A 1.5-kilometer (0.93 mi) section of track was retained to serve Atlas Cement. The remainder of the right-of-way was transformed into the Nor-Bath Trail.[25] U.S. Steel also owned the Atlantic City Mine Railroad, whose 76.7-mile line in Wyoming operated from 1962 until 1983 and served an iron ore mine north of Atlantic City, Wyoming.

Through its Transtar subsidiary, U.S. Steel also owned other railroads that served its mines and mills. Those properties included the Duluth, Missabe & Iron Range Railway in the iron-mining region of northeast Minnesota; the Elgin, Joliet & Eastern that served its Gary Works in northwest Indiana; the Birmingham Southern serving the U.S. Steel mill in Birmingham, Alabama; and the Bessemer & Lake Erie and Union railroads in western Pennsylvania that delivered iron ore and provided plant-switching services at its mill complex in Braddock, Pennsylvania and coke works in Clairton, Pennsylvania.

U.S. Steel also owned a large Great Lakes commercial freighter fleet, under the Pittsburgh Steamship Company, that transported its raw materials from the Duluth area to Ashtabula, Gary, and Conneaut, Ohio. The laker fleet, the B&LE, and the DM&IR were acquired by Canadian National after U.S. Steel sold most of Transtar to that company. The ships are leased out to a different, domestic operator because of United States cabotage law.

The Board of Directors considers the declaration of dividends four times each year, with checks for dividends declared on common stock mailed for receipt on 10 March, June, September, and December. In 2008, the dividend was $0.30 per share, the highest in company history but on April 27, 2009, it was reduced to $0.05 per share.[28] Dividends may be paid by mailed check, direct electronic deposit into a bank account, or be reinvested in additional shares of U.S. Steel common stock.[29]

U.S. Steel maintained the labor policies of Andrew Carnegie, which called for low wages and opposition to unionization. The Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers union that represented workers at the Homestead, Pennsylvania, plant was, for many years, broken after a violent strike in 1892. U.S. Steel defeated another strike in 1901, the year it was founded. U.S. Steel built the city of Gary, Indiana in 1906, and 100 years later it remained the location of the largest integrated steel mill in the Northern Hemisphere. U.S. Steel reached a détente with unions during World War I, when under pressure from the Wilson Administration it relaxed its opposition to unions enough to allow some to operate in certain factories. It returned to its previous policies as soon as the war ended, however, and in a 1919 strike defeated union-organizing efforts by William Z. Foster of the AFL.[30]

Heavy pressure from public opinion forced the Company to give up its 12-hour day and adopt the standard eight-hour day.[31] During the 1920s, U.S. Steel, like many other large employers, coupled paternalistic employment practices with "employee representation plans" (ERPs), which were company unions sponsored by management. These ERPs eventually became an important factor leading to the organization of the United Steelworkers of America. The Company dropped its hard-line, anti-union stance in 1937, when Myron Taylor, then president of U.S. Steel, agreed to recognize the Steel Workers Organizing Committee, an arm of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) led by John L. Lewis. Taylor was an outsider, brought in during the Great Depression to rescue U.S. Steel, and had no emotional investment in the Company's long history of opposition to unions. Watching the upheaval caused by the United Auto Workers' successful sit-down strike in Flint, Michigan, and convinced that Lewis was someone he could deal with on a businesslike basis, Taylor sought stability through collective bargaining.[32][33]

The Steelworkers continue to have a contentious relationship with U.S. Steel, but far less so than the relationship that other unions had with employers in other industries[which?] in the United States. They launched a number of long strikes against U.S. Steel in 1946 and a 116-day strike in 1959, but those strikes were over wages and benefits and not the more fundamental issue of union recognition that led to violent strikes elsewhere.[34][35]

The Steelworkers union attempted to mollify the problems of competitive foreign imports by entering into a so-called Experimental Negotiation Agreement (ENA) in 1974. This was to provide for arbitration in the event that the parties were not able to reach agreement on any new collective bargaining agreements, thereby preventing disruptive strikes. The ENA failed to stop the decline of the steel industry in the U.S.[36]

U.S. Steel and the other employers terminated the ENA in 1984. In 1986, U.S. Steel employees stopped work after a dispute over contract terms, characterized by the company as a strike and by the union as a lockout. In a letter to striking employees in 1986, Johnston warned, "There are not enough seats in the steel lifeboat for everybody."[37] In addition to reducing the role of unions, the steel industry had sought to induce the federal government to take action to counteract dumping of steel by foreign producers at below-market prices. Neither the concessions nor anti-dumping laws have restored the industry to the health and prestige it once had.[38]

In three days, 20 people died... After the inversion lifted, another 50 died, including Lukasz Musial, the father of baseball great Stan Musial. Hundreds more lived the rest of their lives with damaged lungs and hearts. But another 40 years would pass before the whole truth about Donora's bad air made public-health history.[39]

Today the Donora Smog Museum in that city tells of the influence that the hazardous Donora Smog had on the air quality standards enacted by the federal government in subsequent years.

When the Steelmark logo was created, U.S. Steel attached the following meaning to it: "Steel lightens your work, brightens your leisure and widens your world."[49] The logo was used as part of a major marketing campaign to educate consumers about how important steel is in people's daily lives. The Steelmark logo was used in print, radio and television ads as well as on labels for all steel products, from steel tanks to tricycles to filing cabinets.[50]

In the 1960s, U.S. Steel turned over the Steelmark program to the AISI, where it came to represent the steel industry as a whole. During the 1970s, the logo's meaning was extended to include the three materials used to produce steel: yellow for coal, orange for ore and blue for steel scrap. In the late 1980s, when the AISI founded the Steel Recycling Institute (SRI), the logo took on a new life reminiscent of its 1950s meaning.[51]

The Pittsburgh Steelers professional football team borrowed elements of its logo, a circle containing three hypocycloids, from the Steelmark logo belonging to the American Iron and Steel Institute (AISI) and created by U.S. Steel. In the 1950s, when helmet logos became popular, the Steelers added players' numbers to either side of their gold helmets. Later that decade, the numbers were removed and in 1962, Cleveland's Republic Steel suggested to the Steelers that they use the Steelmark as a helmet logo.[52]

The Chicago Picasso sculpture was fabricated by U.S. Steel in Gary, Indiana, before being disassembled and relocated to Chicago.[55] U.S. Steel donated the steel for the cathedral of St. Michael's in Chicago since 90 percent of the parishioners worked at its mills.[56]

Of note in the United States is Clairton Works, Edgar Thomson Works, and Irvin Plant, which are all members of Mon Valley Works [65] just outside Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Clairton Works is the largest coking facility in North America. Edgar Thomson Works is one of the oldest steel mills in the world. The Company acquired Great Lakes Works and Granite City Works, both large integrated steel mills, in 2003 and is partnered with Severstal North America in operating the world's largest electro-galvanizing line, Double Eagle Steel Coating Company at the historic Rouge complex in Dearborn, Michigan.

U.S. Steel's largest domestic facility is Gary Works, in Gary, Indiana, on the shore of Lake Michigan. For many years, the Gary Works Plant was the largest steel mill and it remains the largest integrated mill in North America. It was built in 1906 and has been operating since 28 June 1908. Gary is also home to the U.S. Steel Yard baseball stadium.

U.S. Steel operates two major taconite mining and pelletizing operations in northeastern Minnesota's Iron Range under the operating name Minnesota Ore Operations. The Minntac mine is located near Mountain Iron, Minnesota and the Keetac mine is near Keewatin, Minnesota. U.S. Steel announced on February 1, 2008, that it would be investing approximately $300 Million in upgrading the operations at Keetac, a facility purchased in 2003 from the now-defunct National Steel Corporation.[69]

U.S. Steel added facilities in Hamilton and Nanticoke, Ontario, Canada with the purchase of Stelco (now U.S. Steel Canada) in 2007.[73] These facilities were sold in 2016 to venture capital firm Bedrock Resources and has since been renamed Stelco. The blast furnaces in Hamilton have not been reactivated as they were shut down by US Steel in 2013, but those at Nanticoke are functional.[74]

The company opened a training facility, the Mon Valley Works Training Hub, in Duquesne, Pennsylvania in 2008. The state-of-the-art facility, located on a portion of the property once occupied by the company's Duquesne Works, serves as the primary training site for employees at U.S. Steel's three Pittsburgh-area Mon Valley Works locations. This site also served as the company's temporary technical support headquarters during the 2009 G20 Summit.[75]

In the 1974 Classic "Godfather II," Hyman Roth, played by Lee Strasberg says to Michael Corleone: "Michael, we're bigger than U.S. Steel." U.S. Steel's revenues in 1959, the year in which that scene is set, were $3.47 Billion, or $29 Billion in 2017 dollars.